Start-ups and state secrets: what Silicon Valley can do for homeland security

Ars contemplates a DIY nuke detector, and considers what it and the CIA's …

Do-it-yourself nuke detectors

A while back, Wired ran a fascinating article about a group of researchers from Sandia National Laboratories who had cobbled together a do-it-yourself nuke detector from common, off-the-shelf parts. With their detector fitted to the bow of a boat, this group of private citizens patrols the San Francisco Bay, sniffing for nuclear material that might be hidden in shipping containers almost a mile distant.

There's something overwhelmingly compelling about the symmetry inherent in the DIY nuke detector story: in an era when small, highly motivated, loosely connected groups of terrorists threaten our security by turning against us the cheap, plentiful fruits of our entrepreneurship and technological innovation (computers, mobile phones, the Internet, mass transit, international shipping, etc.), a group of scientists are taking that same bottom-up, ad hoc approach to countering the terrorist threat. Contrast the Sandia group's work to the high-dollar nuclear detectors described in the same article, detectors designed by big defense labs under government contract:

Currently, 14-foot, $180,000 pillars detect gamma rays and high-energy neutrons when container-laden trucks drive between them. Glaros, who has inspected the portal at the Port of Oakland in California is not impressed. "Have you been over and seen that operation?" he asked. "Absolutely f-ing worthless." Truck drivers in a hurry can just drive around the thing, said Glaros, whose company, Gull Group, outsources weapons development and production for government laboratories.

New DHS-ordered monitors will come from Raytheon, Thermo Electron and Canberra Industries at a cost of $300,000 to $600,000 apiece, according to Vayl Oxford, director of the Domestic Nuclear Detection Office, or DNDO.

Whether it's nuke detection technology at ports, computer automated wiretapping and data traffic snooping, or massive government data mining operations, our present approach to homeland security is embodied for me in those 14-foot pillars: ponderous, expensive technologies designed by government-funded teams of scientists who're working in vain to outmaneuver not just the terrorists, but the surging global market for technological innovation in which those terrorists thrive. By way of contrast, the Sandia group's DIY nuke detector represents an attempt to fight fire with fire by harnessing the same market forces and entrepreneurial spirit that terrorists have learned to use so effectively.

In this article, I want to take a close look at the historical and technological currents that underlie these two starkly different approaches to homeland security—Raytheon's 14-foot pillars and the scientists' DIY nuke detector. I'll also try to draw some broader lessons from the historical outline and I'll give some concrete policy recommendations. If you like, you can consider this article as a follow-up to a previous article of mine, AT&T Labs vs. Google Labs: not your grandfather's R&D. I'll deal here with many of the same themes and issues that I covered in the previous article, but this time I'll set them within the context of national security.

Cold War/GSAVE Jeopardy

One of the lessons that former Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara hammers home in the outstanding documentary, Fog of War, is that disaster invariably ensues (i.e., Vietnam) when post-Cold War problems are viewed by American leaders through the lens of the Cold War. McNamara recounts how he and the other American architects of the Vietnam war considered the Asian conflict as one battle in the global struggle against communist ideology, and this viewpoint framed their entire approach to it. However, in the early 1990s McNamara got the chance to sit down and do a conflict post mortem with his North Vietnamese counterparts from that era, and he discovered that North Vietnam understood the conflict to be a struggle for national independence against a foreign colonial power that wanted to occupy their country and subjugate their people.

In other words, a succession of US administrations were thinking of the Vietnam conflict in terms of America's conflict with the USSR, while the Vietnamese leadership viewed it through the lens of their own thousand-year conflict with China. So neither party had a clue what the other was thinking, and the results of that misunderstanding are with us to this day in various forms.

While the current administration often seems to have adopted the sentiment, "9/11 changed everything," as a governing philosophy, even a cursory glance their approach to what they've at one point dubbed the "global struggle against violent extremism" (GSAVE) shows that the Cold War glasses are still squarely affixed to our heads of state. To illustrate this point, let's play a little Jeopardy. Take a look at the following list of answers, and tell me which of these two questions they go with: (a) "what is the Cold War," or (b) "what is the GSAVE":

It's a long, global struggle that pits freedom and democracy against an evil, oppressive ideology.

It's a struggle that involves a series of conventional armed conflicts against state actors, as a way of staving off a nuclear catastrophe.

It's a struggle that can be won by granting huge contracts to large, well-connected firms to develop advanced technology for surveillance and weapons.

It's something that we could use a really expensive anti-ballistic missle shield for.

Regardless of whether you answered (a) or (b), you're right either way. Sure, our leaders may talk about the newly important role that non-state actors play in our national security policy, and about how the enemy is engaging in "asymmetrical warfare" and "netwar," and about how the era of bipolar superpowers is over, and myriad other big changes that they point out in speeches and in policy documents like The National Security Strategy of the United States, but at its root, the GSAVE involves the same cast of characters pursuing the same overarching approach to national security that they pursued when they were fighting communism.

But this article isn't a comprehensive manifesto about how we ought to fight the GSAVE, or how the very concept of the GSAVE as a single, multifaceted struggle obscures more than it enlightens, so I'll leave off saying any more about the first two items on my list above. Let me focus instead on the third item, and on the origins of the deeply ingrained, Cold War notion that fighting any kind of enemy—even the most shadowy, most loosely affiliated group of non-state actor—necessarily involves big contracts handed out to large corprorations with secret labs.